The
burgeoning scandal over claims that a Pentagon official passed highly
classified secrets to a Zionist lobby group appears to be part of a much
broader set of FBI and Pentagon investigations of close collaboration
between prominent U.S. neoconservatives and Israel dating back some 30
years.

According to knowledgeable
sources, who asked to not be identified, the FBI (Federal Bureau of
Investigation) has been intensively reviewing a series of past
counter-intelligence probes that were started against several high-profile
neocons but never followed up with prosecutions, to the great frustration of
counterintelligence officers, in some cases.

Some of these past
investigations involve top current officials, including Deputy Secretary of
Defense Paul Wolfowitz; Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith,
whose office appears to be the focus of the most recently disclosed inquiry;
and Richard Perle, who resigned as Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman last
year.

All three were the subject
of a
lengthy investigative story by Stephen Green published by
Counterpunch.org in February. Green is the author of two books on
U.S.-Israeli relations, including Taking Sides: America's Secret
Relations with a Militant Israel, which relies heavily on interviews
with former Pentagon and counterintelligence officials.

At the same time, another
Pentagon office concerned with the transfer of sensitive military and
dual-use technologies has been examining the acquisition, modification and
sales of key hi-tech military equipment by Israel obtained from the United
States, in some cases with the help of prominent neoconservatives who were
then serving in the government.

Some of that equipment has
been sold by Israel – which in the last 20 years has become a top exporter
of the world's most sophisticated hi-tech information and weapons technology
– or by Israeli middlemen, to Russia, China and other potential U.S.
strategic rivals. Some of it has also found its way onto the black market,
where terrorist groups – possibly including al-Qaeda – obtained bootlegged
copies, according to these sources.

Of particular interest in
that connection are derivatives of a powerful case-management software
called PROMIS that was produced by INSLAW Inc. in the early 1980s and
acquired by Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, which then sold its own
versions to other foreign intelligence agencies in the Middle East, Asia and
Eastern Europe.

But these versions were
modified with a "trap door" that permitted the seller to spy on the buyers'
own intelligence files, according to a number of published reports.

A modified version of the
software, which is used to monitor and track files on a multitude of
databases, is believed to have been acquired by al-Qaeda on the black market
in the late 1990s, possibly facilitating the group's global banking and
money-laundering schemes, according to a Washington Times story of June
2001.

According to one source,
Pentagon investigators believe it possible that al-Qaeda used the software
to spy on various U.S. agencies that could have detected or foiled the Sept.
11, 2001 attack.

The FBI is reportedly also
involved in the Pentagon's investigation, which is overseen by Deputy
Undersecretary of Defense for International Technology Security John A.
"Jack" Shaw with the explicit support of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

The latest incident is
based on allegations that a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) career
officer, Larry Franklin – who was assigned in 2001 to work in a special
office dealing with Iraq and Iran under Feith – provided highly classified
information, including a draft on U.S. policy towards Iran, to two staff
members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), one of
Washington's most powerful lobby groups. One or both of the recipients
allegedly passed the material to the Israeli embassy.

Franklin has not commented
on the allegation, and Israel and AIPAC have strongly denied any involvement
and say they are cooperating fully with FBI investigators.

The office in which
Franklin has worked since 2001 is dominated by staunch neoconservatives,
including Feith himself. Headed by William Luti, a retired Navy officer who
worked for DPB member Newt Gingrich when he was speaker of the House of
Representatives, it played a central role in building the case for war in
Iraq.

Part of the office's
strategy included working closely with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) led
by now-disgraced exile Ahmed Chalabi, and the DPB members in developing and
selectively leaking intelligence analyses that supported the now-discredited
thesis that former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein had close ties to
al-Qaeda.

Feith's office enjoyed
especially close links with Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, I.
Lewis Libby, to whom it "stovepiped" its analyses without having them vetted
by professional intelligence analysts in the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA), the DIA, or the State Department Bureau for Intelligence of Research
(INR).

Since the Iraq war, Feith's
office has also lobbied hard within the U.S. government for a
confrontational posture vis-à-vis Iran and Syria, including actions aimed at
destabilizing both governments – policies which, in addition to the ousting
of Hussein, have been strongly and publicly urged by prominent, hard-line
neoconservatives, such as Perle, Feith and Perle's associate at the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), Michael Ledeen, among others.

Despite his status as a
career officer, Franklin, who is an Iran specialist, is considered both
personally and ideologically close to several other prominent
neoconservatives, who have also acted in various consultancy roles at the
Pentagon, including Ledeen and Harold Rhode, who once described himself as
Deputy Secretary of State Paul Wolfowitz's chief adviser on Islam.

In Dec. 2001, Rhode and
Franklin met in Europe with a shadowy Iranian arms dealer, Manucher
Ghorbanifar, who, along with Ledeen, played a central role in the
arms-for-hostages deal involving the Reagan administration, Israel and Iran
in the mid-1980s that became known as the "Iran-Contra Affair."

Ledeen set up the more
recent meetings that apparently triggered the FBI to launch its
investigation, which has intensified in recent months amid reports that
Chalabi's INC, which has long been championed by the neoconservatives, has
been passing sensitive intelligence to Iran.

Feith has long been an
outspoken supporter of Israel's Likud Party, and his former law partner Marc
Zell has served as a spokesman in Israel for the Jewish settler movement on
the occupied West Bank.

He, Perle and several other
like-minded hardliners participated in a task force that called for
then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to work for the installation
of a friendly government in Baghdad as a means of permanently altering the
balance of power in the Middle East in Israel's favor, permitting it to
abandon the Oslo peace process, which Feith had publicly opposed.

Previously, Feith served as
a Middle East analyst in the National Security Council in the administration
of former President Ronald Reagan (1981-89), but was summarily removed from
that position in March 1982 because he had been the object of a FBI inquiry
into whether he had provided classified material to an official of the
Israeli embassy in Washington, according to Green's account.

But Perle, who was then
serving as assistant secretary of defense for international security policy
(ISP), which, among other responsibilities, had an important say in
approving or denying licenses to export sensitive military or dual-use
technology abroad, hired him as his "special counsel" and later as his
deputy, where he served until 1986, when he left for his law practice with
Zell, who had by then moved to Israel.

Also serving under Perle
during these years was Stephen Bryen, a former staff member of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee and the subject of a major FBI investigation in
the late 1970s for offering classified documents to an Israeli intelligence
officer in the presence of AIPAC's director, according to Green's account,
which is backed up by some 500 pages of investigation documents released
under a Freedom of Information request some 15 years ago.

Although political
appointees decided against prosecution, Bryen was reportedly asked to leave
the committee and, until his appointment by Perle in 1981, served as head of
the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), a group
dedicated to promoting strategic ties between the United States and Israel
and one in which Perle, Feith and Ledeen have long been active.

In his position as Perle's
deputy, Bryen created the Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA)
which enforced regulations regarding technology transfer to foreign
countries.

During his tenure,
according to one source with personal knowledge of Bryen's work, "the U.S.
shut down transfers to western Europe and Japan [which were depicted as too
ready to sell them to Moscow] and opened up a back door to Israel" – a
pattern that became embarrassingly evident after Perle left office and the
current deputy secretary of state, Richard Armitage, took over in 1987.

Soon, Armitage was raising
serious questions about Bryen's approval of sensitive exports to Israel
without appropriate vetting by other agencies.

"It is in the interest of
U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation
between them," Feith wrote in Commentary in 1992. "Technologies in the hands
of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like
Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote
peace thereby."

Perle, Ledeen, and
Wolfowitz have also been the subject of FBI inquiries, according to Green's
account. In 1970, one year after he was hired by Senator Henry "Scoop"
Jackson, an FBI wiretap authorized for the Israeli Embassy picked up Perle
discussing classified information with an embassy official, while Wolfowitz
was investigated in 1978 for providing a classified document on the proposed
sale of a U.S. weapons system to an Arab government to an Israeli official
via an AIPAC staffer.

In 1992, when he was
serving as undersecretary of defense for policy, Pentagon officials looking
into the unauthorized export of classified technology to China, found that
Wolfowitz's office was promoting Israel's export of advanced air-to-air
missiles to Beijing in violation of a written agreement with Washington on
arms re-sales.

The FBI and the Pentagon
are reportedly taking a new look at all of these incidents and others to, in
the words of a
New York
Times story Sunday, "get a better understanding of the relationships
among conservative officials with strong ties to Israel."

It would be a mistake to
see Franklin as the chief target of the current investigation, according to
sources, but rather he should be viewed as one piece of a much broader
puzzle.